1. Field of Invention
The disclosure is directed to systems and methods for generating textures with depth buffers.
2. Description of Related Art
There is a huge market for photographic images. Everyday, various photographic images are created for a variety of reasons. For instance, people take a photographic image of an event or scene to capture a personal moment. In other instances, a photographic image is taken for its commercial value. However, the image taken is usually two-dimensional, and therefore lifeless. Stated differently, the image lacks depth. To provide realism to their images, various commercial and non-commercial entities have developed three-dimensional (3-D) imaging techniques to create a “virtual reality.” Currently, these 3-D images are used in games and entertainment, training simulations, to create virtual museums and libraries, in terrain mapping, and to create virtual buildings and structures, vehicles, animated and non-animated objects and landmarks.
As the basis for generating a portion of a 3-D image, or a complete 3-D image, of an object, techniques have been developed to gather texture, and depth (z-buffer) at various points on the surface of the object, which are then used to create the portion of or the complete 3-D image of the object. A known technique uses stereoscopic imaging equipment having two digital cameras to capture a stereo image of an object. However, prior to capturing the stereo image, the cameras are usually adjusted so that the object can be captured in both cameras to produce the stereo image. Further, when the cameras are adjusted, the cameras are “calibrated” so that the cameras can operate in a common coordinate system. Calibration is important because an object image captured by one camera needs to be cross-referenced with the corresponding object image captured by the other camera. Cross-referencing the two images provides the depth at various points on the surface of the object, which is used to generate the 3-D image of the object.